The cover of Ralph Cokonougher’s “The Genealogy of the Family of Ralph William Cokonougher” is pictured above.
The Times-Gazette
Greenfield author Ralph Cokonougher has recently completed the revision of a genealogical history book that traces three local families from modern times to pre-Revolutionary colonial America.
"The Genealogy of the Family of Ralph William Cokonougher" is a follow-up to a book Cokonougher published in 1979 and follows the family history of the Cokonougher, Hester and Wisecup families.
Other family names mentioned include Miller, Clark, Hixson, Steinmetz, Frost, Long, Storts, Spurgeon, Levy, DeVoss, Sinclaire, Barleon, Shoemaker, Wooten, and Waid, and others from Ross, Highland, and Adams counties in Southern Ohio, and Michigan, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Individual profiles not only give names, dates and locations, but also relate oral family history stories that give insight into the character and thinking of those in this family tree. Ninety-nine photographs from the last 150 years and more than 365 family group listings are included.
Cokonougher has researched his family's history for more than 35 years. He originally wrote a short version of his family's genealogy and had no intentions of doing another. However, his research continued, and so many people wanted to know about his discoveries that he decided this year to do a larger, revised edition.
"I think people will be surprised and entertained by some of the stories in the book," Cokonougher said. "For example, some of my family's ancestors were sold at public auction when they first arrived in America, even though they were white Swiss-Germans. Another ancestor reportedly came to America as a shanghaied prisoner of pirates. Many ancestors were soldiers. They served and fought in every major American war, including the Revolutionary War, without a single one being killed in battle. The book even tells of a wicked stepmother who starved her stepchildren and beat them bloody with a switch cut from a thorny rose bush. It takes all kinds of people to make a family and a nation, and the reader will find several of them in my book."
Cokonougher, is a graduate of Ohio University, a U.S. Air Force Vietnam War Era veteran and an ordained Spiritualist minister. He has been writing and publishing since 1973, and has previously written and produced more than eight books and compact disks, including books about Ross County cemetery inscriptions, stone house construction and water supply sources.
"Like most genealogists, I wanted to wait until I had completed my research before I published a final family history," Cokonougher said. "However, I realized that a true genealogist can never complete his or her research, because for every ancestor he digs up, there is at least two more to find. That is because everyone has parents. The more work you do in genealogy, the more work you will find to do. You can never be finished. I've known many people who spent several years of their life researching their family tree, accumulating thousands of pages of documents, intending to publish their results one day, and then dying before they could get around to it. Everything they did was either lost or destroyed by other people who failed to recognize the value of their research. I didn't want that to happen to my work, and I had so many requests from other people who wanted me to publish that I just decided to go ahead and put out there what I had accumulated so far. It turned out that I had far more material than I realized, and I had to condense and cut a lot of it just to get the book to a manageable size."
Reader Comments
Posted: Saturday, December 05, 2009
Article comment by:
Ron Dudley
Looks like it is being self-published at www.lulu.com along with some of his other works. http://stores.lulu.com/cokonougher
I'll be adding this to my blog so that others will know where to find it as well.
